092: Fathers’ unique role in parenting

(Introduction added after the episode was recorded and transcribed): Before we get started with today’s episode on the unique role of fathers in children’s development, as well as why children prefer one parent over another, I wanted to let you know about three super cool things that I’m working on you. The first is about my membership group, which is called Finding Your Parenting Mojo. I don’t mention the group a lot on the show because I don’t like over-selling, but a listener who was in the group the last time I opened it to new members told me she actually didn’t know I had a membership group, so I’m going to tell you a bit more about it this time around! The group is for parents who are on board with the ideas you hear about on the podcast based in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting, but struggle to put them into practice in real life. So if you find yourself nodding along and saying yep; I agree with the whole ‘no rewards and punishments’ thing and I’m on board with working with my child to solve the problems we have, and I really want to relax a bit around my child’s eating, but on the other hand you’re thinking: but rewarding with story time is the only way I can get my child to brush their flipping teeth, and how do I even get started with working with my child to solve problems? And if I ever did relax around my child’s eating then all they would eat is goldfish and gummy bears, then the group is for you. We spend a month digging into each issue that parents face – from tantrums to figuring out your goals as a parent and for your child to getting on the same page as your partner (and knowing when it’s OK to have different approaches!)…raising healthy eaters to navigating screen time and supporting sibling relationships; we cover it all. I’ll open the group to new members in July, and it closes at the end of July and on August 1st we start digging into our first topic, which is reducing the number of tantrums you’re experiencing. The cost for the group is $39/month this time around which is locked in for as long as you’re a member - I increased the price from last time, and I may increase it again next time the group reopens. Or if you sign up before July 18th, you can pay for 10 months and get the last two months of the year free. If you’d like to learn more about joining the membership group you can do that at yourparentingmojo.com/membership – the doors will open on July 1st. So that’s the deal with the group. The second cool thing I’m working on is something to give you a taste of what it will be like to be in the group. I’ve heard a lot of parents talking about how their children’s behavior really “triggers” them, and I was going to do a podcast episode on this and then I realized that this is especially one of those topics that you can’t just listen to and expect a change to happen; but if you’re willing to do a bit of work, that you can see enormous payoffs. So I thought OK; how can I really make the greatest impact possible with this work? And I decided to put together a nine-day online workshop to walk you through it. So if you go to yourparentingmojo.com/tameyourtriggers and sign up, staring on July 8th you’ll receive an email from me on each of the next nine week days that walks you through an aspect of this issue. In the first week we focus on where these triggers come from and it might surprise you to learn that it’s not our child’s behavior that is actually the origin of this feeling in us, but it’s things we remember, half-remember, and maybe even don’t remember from our childhoods. The more we know about those, the better we can manage these feelings when they arise in us. In the second week we look at new tools we can use to reduce the number of times we do feel triggered, and on the rarer occasions when it does still happen, to manage our reaction so we don’t blow up at our children. Now, you might have done these kinds of online workshops or challenges before and sometimes they ask you to do really simple things and you’re thinking “but I already do that!”. This workshop will be different. Each day you will get homework that you could do in about 15 minutes, although if you find that you are feeling triggered very often you would probably make a huge amount of progress if you could spare 30 minutes a day for not every day, but some of the nine days of the workshop. And these are not always easy tasks to do – I’ll be asking you to take a hard look at some potentially pretty uncomfortable aspects of your childhood, so you may need to do this gently and carefully. I’ll be doing short live videos in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group every other day or so which you don’t have to watch, but which you may find illuminate the daily emails which I deliberately made as short and concise as possible. By the end of the workshop you should have a great deal of insight into what really causes you to feel triggered, and how you can feel triggered less often and less intensely. And we will probably have a pretty big group of parents who are working through this alongside you, who can offer support and encouragement as you work through this. Obviously this isn’t exactly how the membership group works – we don’t do nine-day series of emails and Facebook Lives every other day; I actually send out a Guide at the beginning of the month and I answer your questions on two live group calls each month. But that format really works better once you’re already committed, and I wanted to be able to help you make real progress on a real issue you’re struggling with, so I decided the workshop was the best way to show you the kind of support you get in the group, even if the format is a bit different. So if you’d like to join the workshop, just head over to yourparentingmojo.com/tameyourtriggers and sign up – we’ll get started on July 8th. FINALLY, the last thing before we get to today’s episode is that you might have noticed that this is episode 92 of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast, which means we’re only eight episodes away from reaching 100! When I started the show two years ago I really had no idea where it was going to take me, or even how long it could last. I’m always worried that I will run out of topics to discuss but I’m happy to say that two years in I actually have a longer list of topics that I still have to find time to cover than I did when I started. As I started thinking about this, I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations…if I figure that on average it takes me about 20 hours to prepare for an episode, by the time I get to 100 episodes that will have been 2,000 hours, which is 250 days, which is very slightly less than a year, which means I’ve spent just a bit less than a third of the last three years preparing podcast episodes for you! If I figure there’s an average of 15 books and peer-reviewed papers on the reference list per episode, that’s 1,500 books and papers that actually made the reference list, and since only about half of the books and papers I read actually make the reference list I’ve probably read somewhere close to 3,000 of them in three years. When I started the show I was really just putting an intention out in the world to see where it might lead, and now I see that this work is what I want to do. It has – without a doubt – made me a better parent, and I want to use tools like the membership group to support you in your parenting as well. I keep producing the podcast episodes because I know that for some of you, a free resource is enough – and I know that by the reviews that you leave me on iTunes and the emails you send me that quite a lot of you get quite a lot out of the show. So I want to do something special for the 100th episode, and I’d love to have your voice be a part of it. If you go to yourparentingmojo.com, you’ll see a button on the homepage that you can use to leave me a voicemail. You could tell me something you learned from the show that has made a difference for your family, or a question you have either about the research on the show or about some aspect of my life that you wish you knew more about. Depending on how many voicemails I receive I’ll put all of you or a selection of you in the 100th episode, in your own voices, and I’ll answer your questions as well. So if you want to do this, just head over to yourparentingmojo.com and hit the icon to record a message. You don’t need any special equipment to do it; you can just speak right into your computer’s microphone, although listeners would probably thank you if you could plug in a headset with a microphone as this will greatly improve the sound quality. It doesn’t have to be a fancy one – just the kind that comes with a smartphone is fine. So head on over to yourparentingmojo.com to record your message and while you’re there, sign up for the Tame Your Triggers workshop and check out the membership group as well. OK, let’s get on with today’s episode!   Jen: 01:20 It's pretty obvious when you're reading the scientific literature on parenting and child development that just as most of the research on children's development is conducted on White children and then the findings are discussed as if they're relevant to all children everywhere. Most of the research on parenting is conducted on mothers and then its applicability to fathers is either extrapolated or it's just simply ignored. So, what role do fathers play in children's development? Our fathers basically like slightly less important mothers or are there unique processes involved in the relationship between fathers and children? Here with us today to sort this out is doctor Diana Coyl-Shepherd Professor at California State University Chico. Her research focuses on mother-child and father-child attachment across the span of childhood and she's especially interested in social and emotional development and children's relationships with their fathers. Welcome Dr. Coyl-Shepherd. Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 02:15 Thank you, Jen. Jen: 02:17 All right, so let's start with, I guess it's kind of the son of the father of attachment theory. The father of Attachment Theory was John Bowlby and so you interviewed his son, Sir Richard Bowlby a few years ago. That must have been pretty exciting. Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 02:32 It was very exciting. Having been a fan both professionally and personally of Attachment Theory for a long time, it was very exciting to meet the son of the author of that theory. Jen: 02:44 Yeah. And so that interview is available for anyone to read in a journal article in early childhood development and care journal. And so I was really shocked to learn that Richard Bowlby actually didn't really talk with his father about Attachment Theory at all and only started learning about it after his father's death. And I was wondering if you could tell us about the different role that Richard Bowlby proposed for fathers and mothers and why mothers had been such a focus of research for so long? Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 03:11 Certainly. Well, what Richard proposed was a model of dual attachment and in the case of heterosexual parents, they would serve complimentary roles in their children's lives. So, mothers would be that safe haven providing care and comfort when children are distressed and fathers, as he observed and other researchers have to, more often were used for secure exploration. So, it was that mothers sensitive responding to their children's distress that increases children's opportunity to turn to their fathers for support during exploration and during challenging tasks. So, what Sir Richard Bowlby explained was that, and this is again based on other people's research as well, that we're driven to explore and seek new experiences, but we need safety and a trusted companion to show us the way. And in our own research we often had children report that they felt safety from their fathers, but more often sought emotional comfort from their mothers. So, each parent can serve both functions of attachment, safety, security and reassurance as well as exploration. But among Western heterosexual couples, we tended to see that mothers and fathers specialized in these areas. Jen: 04:24 Ah, that's fascinating. And so I'm thinking about the ways that we assess this attachment in a lab situation and typically it's using this procedure called The Strange Situation where the mother is withdrawn for certain periods of time and then we look to see how distressed the child is and whether the distress is relieved when the mother comes back. And so it doesn't seem to be that if the child doesn't come to the father to relieve distress, that they're not attached, right? Or is it possible that the way that we are conceptualizing this and the problem is with our measuring tools and not with the attachment between fathers and children. Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 05:03 Exactly right. So, in The Strange Situation that measures in part mother's sensitivity to their children's distress, what it doesn't really measure is what fathers contribute to their children's attachment. And so it was really the research of the Grossmann’s and their colleagues. They did a 16-year longitudinal study, 44 families, and they compared mother's and father's contributions to their children's attachment at ages 6, 10 and 16 and at when the children were toddlers, they had developed this measure called the sensitive and challenging interactive play scale. And what they found, and it's an observational measure of the way that mothers and fathers engaged with their children during play, that father’s play sensitivity was very consistent across the four years and it was father's sensitivity that was predictive of children's internal working models of attachment at when their children were 10 and only fathers play sensitivity, not mothers was predictive of adolescents attachment representations. So, their conclusion was that mothers and fathers are doing different things to support their children's attachment security and consequently we need different ways to assess that. Jen: 06:16 And so I'm just curious as to how this works in sort of real life with real families and whether it doesn't seem as though it's sort of a one person is one role and one person is the other role because I'm sort of the parent who's more likely to stand back and watch as my daughter is climbing up something high and just kinda ask her what's your plan to get down rather than my husband will probably be the one to shout, be careful and we'll both pillow fight with her if she asks us to. So, is it confusing to her at all that that we have this sort of dual role thing going on or not? Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 06:48 I don't think so. I think children's expectations of their parents’ behavior are based on their typical interaction with that parent. So, whatever they usually experience is what they expect to experience. And so if you are engaging in exploration with your child and allowing her to take risks and your husband might be the more cautious of the two that I think she would anticipate that that's the way it goes. That when I want to explore, mom will be my companion and she'll support this. But typically, and in lots of research, fathers do this more than mothers. It’s not that mothers aren't capable of it, it's just typically fathers do it more often. Jen: 07:24 Yeah. Okay. In an article that you and your coauthors wrote in an Introduction to a Special Issue on Fatherhood and Attachment, you said “The link between father attachment quality and children's outcomes are often less direct complicated by individual characteristics like child gender, temperament and father's working models as well as familial and cultural practices.” And that's pretty dense. Can you help us to tease that part a bit? Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 07:48 Yes. There's a lot there. Well certainly, we know that there's research that supports gender differences in the way that parents interact with their children. So for example, that mothers engage with their daughters more frequently and they do more kinds of emotional and social discussion than they do with their sons and fathers more often engage with their sons and the kind of ways that they engage with their sons are activity oriented. So, that sort of supports this model that we're seeing, this idea of father’s activation relationships with their children but more with sons than daughters typically. So, there's a piece there that leads to maybe differential outcomes for children in terms of their social and emotional development based on the way and how often they interact with each parent. But also in culture. Culture plays a role as well because it's really, and this was sort of the argument that Dr. Danielle Paquette made when he developed his measure of the activation relationship of measure he called the Risky Situation is the idea that in cultures where competition is a part of that culture, then what fathers do by the way they engage with their children what he described as rough and tumble kinds of play and security and exploration, that helps children meet the demands in a society where there might be competition. Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 09:07 How do they manage that competition? How do they manage relationships with others? So, more research I think is pointing to the contributions of fathers and sometimes it's sort of an additional contribution beyond what mothers are doing to support their children's social and emotional development. Jen: 09:27 So, I had a lot of questions about that rough and tumble play and because it seems to be a really critical component of children's relationships with their fathers, can you help us understand what's the purpose of this kind of...